In 1983 there was a movie called War Games about a computer whiz who hacks into a military computer and almost causes world war 3. I loved that movie. I was 10 years old when I saw it.

It was around this time that my Dad asked me one day, out of the blue, if I wanted to come with him to run some errands and also stop by the computer store. When we got there he walked in and bought a Commodore 64 computer and gave it to me. It was a complete surprise. I was shocked but I loved it.

When I got home I hooked up it up to an old TV. (I didn't have a proper computer monitor.) And up came the prompt:

I had no idea how to use a computer. I had only seen the movie War Games. So I typed "Let's play a game." And it responded with "Syntax error" which didn't make any sense to me. "Syntax" sounded like the name of an alien or something. I tried again. "Let's play global thermonuclear war." "Syntax error." "Make a really cool game." "Syntax error." Frustrating! My brand new computer didn't even work.

I spent the first week or so typing in characters on the screen to make pictures of flags, because that's all I could figure out how to do. Finally I grudgingly looked in the manual. I started to learn about computers.

At some point I bought a modem. There was no such thing as the internet, but you could connect to "bulletin board services." One such service was KSL. It was free. You could dial in and get the weather forecast. I can still remember the phone number: 575-5911. (Area code prefixes were not required back then.)

I wanted to be like Matthew Broderick in War Games. I wanted to hack into something. So I started writing a computer program that I hoped would help me. But I wasn't a great programmer. There were lots of bugs. I used the free KSL number while I was testing and writing the program. It was late on a Saturday morning. I was totally alone in my basement working on it, dialing and redialing into the KSL weather BBS for probably a couple of hours. At some point the doorbell rang. I went upstairs, opened the door, and there was the sheriff, a big burly man. His arms were crossed. He had mirror sunglasses. He didn't look happy and he was intimidating. I was just a kid. He said, "We've received several calls to 911 from this address. What's going on?"

My stomach lurched. I knew immediately what had happened. But how was I going to explain it? Would he believe me? Did he even know what a computer was? The number my computer program had been dialing was 575-5911 and in my testing, the constant dialing, hanging up, and redialing, it must have sometimes called just the last 3 digits: 911.

I explained all of this to the sheriff and he eventually, thankfully, went away. And that was the end of my days as a computer hacker. Or was it?